sashbar
Been spending a lot of time on here!
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2012
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- Behind the Irony Curtain
- Can others edit my Photos
- Photos NOT OK to edit
A common problem is to use too much DOF and have the suject get lost in the foreground/background detail. That is the problem, in my opinion, of the third shot - lots and lots of detail and we're really not sure where to start looking. On the other hand, the first shot has a pretty clear main subject, and the DOF is sufficiently shallow to allow the background to be present, yet not compete with the main subject. As for the second shot - you'd need a lot of words to describe what is in the frame, and nothing really stands out distinctly.
This is a very widespread point of view, but not nesessary the law. The main problem with shallow DoF in street photography - it does not look natural. Our vision does not have a shallow DoF. We do not see blurred backgrounds. Just as well we do not have selective color vision. So in many cases shallow DoF is just a gimmick aimed to compensate for a bad composition. It is OK in portraiture, but to be honest, in my view with street photography it is often a compromise. A perfect street photo to me is the one with clear focal point, lines of vision AND natural i.e. deep DoF.